page_title: Bush carpentry
section_title: "The bush"
hierarchical_section_title: Bush carpentry / "The bush"
caption_attribution_description: English: View from below of deck of Maldon Timber Suspension Bridge, Maldon, NSW Australia
context_page_description: Bush carpentry is an expression used in Australia and New Zealand that refers to improvised methods of building or repair, using available materials and an ad hoc design, usually in a pioneering or rural context.
context_section_description: In Australian parlance, 'the bush' includes not only all remote and rural areas, but ways of living there, especially the limitations and hardships endured. Even though remote areas in contemporary Australia are easily reachable by air and modern communications, there remains a mythology of the tyranny of distance: tyranny over comfort, sophistication, over civilization itself. The expression bush carpentry includes two criteria of 'remoteness'. The first, that the builder is separated (by lack of formal training) from regular methods of construction. The second, separation (by physical distance) from regular resources such as milled timber, fasteners, specialized tools, and similar manufactured products. Those in both 'remote' circumstances are forced to invent and improvise. They produce a necessary structure or object via unorthodox procedures, and it will be serviceable, if inelegant in appearance.
  Thus, in an Australian suburb today, a self-taught handyman might devise and erect a backyard structure using purchased timber, and practising 'bush carpentry'—a gazebo, a fernery, a children's playhouse for example—while at the same time, a skilled tradesperson, in a distant run of an outback cattle station, might be forced to use heavy tree-trunks, saplings, undressed stone and rusty fencing-wire to construct a stock race.
  These two criteria allow the use of manufactured materials—e.g. milled timber—in an irregular manner, and materials other than wood (stone and iron, for example). They exclude the fabrication of large structures like wharves and bridges, built by contracting tradesmen, which incorporate massive tree trunks, even when a manufactured item, e.g. a steel beam, is available (see illustration of Maldon Bridge repaired by government construction team).
caption: Bush timber supporting deck of Maldon Suspension Bridge.
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